THEM!

Upping The Ante!

THEM!
USA 1954
Directed by Gordon Douglas
Warner Brothers
HMV Exclusive Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some ant sized spoilers.

THEM! is easily one of the very best of the 1950s Atomic Monster paranoia films ever to be made. It takes its ridiculous premise and, like the majority of the ‘monsters mutated by atomic age radiation’ films of the time, treats its subject absolutely seriously. But, this one just seems to go the extra mile with everything and, if anything, this film is more like watching a police procedural movie than anything else, just with the ‘embiggened’ monsters thrown in as the ‘whatdunnit’ element.

The film starts off very strongly with a lone girl of 5 or 6 (played by nine year old Sandy Descher) walking traumatised through the mojave desert with her broken, plastic doll. Two cops find her, among them one of the film’s main protagonists, Sergeant Ben Peterson, played by James Whitmore, who I always tend to think of as ‘the poor man’s Spencer Tracy’, somewhat, in looks at least. He and his partner pick up the ‘mute from shock’ girl and drive her in their car as they investigate a holiday trailer a stretch down the road, which eventually turns out to be the trailer the girl was using with her now deceased parents. They find nothing but carnage (no bodies) on the site and... drumroll... no money is gone but someone has raided the sugar cubes! Now what could possibly be interested in stealing the sugar, I hear you gasp.

When a mysterious, Doc Savage-like trilling is heard in the air, the traumatised girl sits bolt upright in the ambulance they have just loaded here onto, then settles down again when the sound goes, without anyone other than the audience realising she even moved. Then, the two cops leave the girl with the medics and more police who come to check out the scene, while they go to investigate a store in another part of the desert, in case the owner knows something about this mysterious case. Alas, the store is in the same bashed about state with the wall torn off. They find the owner, his rifle snapped in two, his body crushed and lifeless, thrown into the cellar of the shop. And, yeah you guessed it, a whole load of ransacked sugar. Ben leaves his partner behind to guard the crime scene but, after he does so, his partner hears the sound and goes out to check on it... we hear his gun shots and screams as he dies at the hands of... something big. And yes, fans of the Wilhelm Scream sound sample will identify it in a number of places in this movie.

Okay, when the body of the cop is found he, just like the owner, has died from, among other things, being injected with a large dose of formic acid. Hmm... sugar, formic acid... what can it be? It’s got Ben foxed, along with his new friend, FBI agent Robert Graham (played by The Thing itself, James Arness). They call in a scientist who thinks he may have a lead... so we have Dr. Howard Medford, played by Edmund Gwenn (who many remember as Kris Kringle from Miracle On 334th Street but who I found utterly captivating in a film he made for Hitchcock just a year after this one, The Trouble With Harry) and his equally scientific daughter Patricia, played by Joan Weldon, who is the female/barely hinted at love interest in the movie.

And it takes these two to reveal that the culprit in this ‘whatdunnit’ is, of course, giant sized ants that have been mutated by atomic bomb testing over the last nine years. This is further underpinned when, they are forced to reveal this far fetched theory after Patricia is menaced by a marauding ant and they have to shoot out its antenna to help kill it. But the ant problem is not a small one, if you’ll pardon the observation. If something isn’t done to stop the growth of the colony, it will be less than a year before man is no longer the dominant species on the Earth. Our intrepid heroes manage to find the nest, destroy it and poison the ants inside but many of them, the queen and some flying newborns, have already flown the coop for fresh pastures. And where this movie could easily have gone into the standard sci fi/monster melodrama by this point, it actually stays a police procedural, as the police and FBI, working far more co-operatively than I’ve seen them working together in most movies, start following leads and witnesses for sightings such as ant shaped flying saucers and big ‘sugar heists’. Eventually the film takes us to the nest of ants hiding in the storm drains under Los Angeles...so for a second time, the various factions including the military, arm themselves with flame throwers and seek the ants in their nest.

And it’s just a great movie. Originally it was to be shot in colour and 3D but a nervous studio changed that to 2D and black and white just days before filming commenced. That being said, the opening title letters of THEM! are coloured up red against the black and white background. But I suspect the black and white photography also helps disguise the worst aspects of the giant, animatronic ants and, as you’ll see in some of the deleted effects shots included on this Blu Ray, things were cut out when the ants were just standing there looking too clunky. And, yes, there are some silly bits, like when the police and FBI are using bazookas to heat up the top of the nest and these little cartooned on beams of light suddenly appear coming from the ends of the weapon. But it’s mostly pretty cool and, the flame throwers are certainly real. If you’re wondering how the actors such as Whitmore and Arness are so trained up on using these safely, well, apparently they were combat veterans who were used to using them during the second world war.

The film has a gutsy moment near the end also, when Sergeant Ben sacrifices his own life to giant ant mandibles rescuing two kids... so that’s not a nice thing to do to the audience but it’s very effective, because Arness is trapped on his own with the ants in the next scene and you’re wondering if the director will kill him off at this moment too.

Eagle eyed viewers may spot a young, pre-Spock Leonard Nimoy as one of the army men in one scene, if that’s of any interest to you. Also, when Walt Disney was looking at this film with a mind to cast James Arness as Davey Crocket, he saw Fess Parker in a scene and chose him instead. The film was directed, of course, by none other than Gordon Douglas who did some great films in his career, such as Rio Conchos (reviewed here), In Like Flint (review coming next year) and Frank Sinatra’s Tony Rome films. Also, he helmed the first of the two sequels to In The Heat Of The Night, namely They Call Me Mister Tibbs! So, I have to wonder, between that film and THEM!, is he the director who has made the most movies with an exclamation mark in the title. Surely not but, if you know, then please hit me up in the comments section below.

One last thing which I never hear mentioned but, well, I think it’s kind of an important observation. A traumatised little girl with a broken doll who has had a traumatic incident with some kind of exo-skeleton creature where the film’s main protagonist eventually has to track the threat back to their nest, armed with a flame thrower. Sound familiar? I’m pretty sure, given his interests, that James Cameron must have loved this film and absorbed it, either subconsciously or otherwise, when he was writing his big hit sequel movie ALIENS... yeah, think about traumatised Newt in that film with her broken, plastic doll and Sigourney Weaver with her flame thrower. I’m pretty sure THEM! must have been in the back of his mind at the very least.

So there you have it... THEM! is a great movie with a cast of really good actors making the ridiculous premise seem just about feasible (or at least giving it the required gravitas to keep the audience interested throughout the running time) and all aided by Bronislau Kaper’s fugue-tastic score (which is available on a very faithful re-recording on the first of the Monstrous Movie Music compilation CDs, which you can buy here). This film is still a load of fun and, to quote my dad who was watching this with me... “I don’t remember this film being so complex!” So there you have it folks... not just another atomic age monster movie (not that there’s anything wrong with that, they’re great) but easily one of the best and most iconic. Iconic enough that both the ants themselves and their eerie warbling sound effect would feature in at least one referential movie cameo, over the years (I’m thinking of the brilliant Looney Tunes Back In Action but there have probably been some others, for sure).